{"id":1393,"date":"2007-12-14T14:17:30","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T19:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/?p=1393"},"modified":"2026-02-09T14:56:28","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T19:56:28","slug":"indigenous-people-describe-real-perils-of-global-warming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/press-releases\/indigenous-people-describe-real-perils-of-global-warming\/","title":{"rendered":"Indigenous people describe real perils of global warming"},"content":{"rendered":"<strong>December 14, 2007<\/strong>\r\n\r\nNUSA\u00a0DUA,\u00a0INDONESIA\u00a0Indigenous people, including Canadian Inuit and Indian leaders, are emerging as some of the top stars of the\u00a0Bali\u00a0climate-change conference.\r\n\r\nFrom the\u00a0Arctic\u00a0to the South Pacific islands, indigenous people said they are among the first to suffer the worst effects of global warming.\r\n\r\nThey drew connections between the planet's north and south, describing how the melting glaciers in the\u00a0Arctic\u00a0are jeopardizing the existence of small island states in the Pacific, and how severe ocean storms are imperilling people in both regions.\r\n\r\nWhen the indigenous leaders spoke at a side event at the\u00a0Bali\u00a0conference this week, the room was packed with a standing-room-only audience of environmentalists and others. The leaders also spoke at other conference events, giving accounts of how global warming is threatening their traditional ways of life.\r\n\r\nArctic aboriginal villages are facing erosion, fragile ice is endangering their hunters, caribou herds are at risk from shifting weather and severe storms are becoming more frequent in the north and the south, they said.\r\n\r\n\"Some Inuit have already made changes to the traditional times of the year which they travel on the land,\" said Violet Ford, a Canadian Inuit leader from northern\u00a0Labrador\u00a0and a vice-president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.\r\n\r\n\"Some find themselves collecting their winter wood and other supplies in the spring when they only used to do so in the fall. Why? Because the fall freeze-up is later and more dangerous.\"\r\n\r\nThe shifting climate is interfering with ancient hunting patterns, Ms. Ford said in an interview. \"We can't predict the weather any more, so it's very difficult to plan our hunting. It puts a lot of stress and fear into our communities.\"\r\n\r\nSimilar threats are faced by the aboriginal people of the\u00a0Western Arctic, who depend on caribou as their main source of food. \"Over the last few years, the caribou have been very unpredictable,\" said Cindy Dickson, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in a remote corner of the\u00a0Yukon.\r\n\r\n\"Their migration routes are all over the map,\" she said. \"It has led our people to go up river, down river, sometimes hundreds of miles, to look for the increasingly elusive herd.\"\r\n\r\nAboriginal leaders were not consulted when the\u00a0Kyoto\u00a0treaty was negotiated in 1997, but they are insisting that they must be consulted in future negotiations on how to cope with global warming.\r\n\r\n\"We bring a unique knowledge to these discussions,\" said\u00a0Patricia Cochran, an Alaskan Inuit who is chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. \"We have to make sure that our voice is heard.\"\r\n\r\nBecause of global warming, Inuit people no longer feel safe travelling on ice where they travelled for centuries and some Inuit communities are sliding into the sea, forcing their relocation to new sites, Ms. Cochran said.\r\n\r\n\"It's a very frightening thing for all of us. It's the loss of our culture and livelihood. How can we remain intact as aboriginal people?\"\r\n\r\nDave Porter, a Kaska Dene leader from northern\u00a0British Columbia, came to\u00a0Bali\u00a0to tell delegates that his people are under massive pressure from a climate-induced infestation of the mountain pine beetle.\r\n\r\n\"We are faced with our greatest threat ever,\" he said in a speech to a conference side event. \"The area of dead trees in\u00a0British Columbia\u00a0is the size of\u00a0Portugal\u00a0or\u00a0South Korea. It rivals the destruction of the Amazon and Indonesian rain forests. More than 100 First Nations communities are directly impacted. If the epidemic eats its way across\u00a0Canada, the impacted communities could be in the thousands.\"\r\n\r\nBecause winters are not cold enough to kill the beetle infestation, millions of hectares of pine trees have died, Mr. Porter said.\r\n\r\n\"It dwarfs any other insect epidemic ever seen before in\u00a0Canada. The interior of\u00a0British Columbia\u00a0is now filled with immense regions of dead and dying forests, creating a massive tinderbox just waiting for a spark to literally set it ablaze. Left unchecked, this devastation could spread through\u00a0Canada's boreal forests from coast to coast, a distance of nearly 9,000 kilometres.\"\r\n\r\nFor centuries, aboriginal people were able to adapt to the environment, he said. But they have never faced anything like the current threat. \"Now in a very short period of time, the industrial society has put us at risk.\"\r\n\r\n<strong>Copyright 2007 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.<\/strong>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-38","category-press-releases"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":987515296,"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1393\/revisions\/987515296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inuitcircumpolar.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}